Beneath the Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street in Boston, tucked away in the basement, sits a library. A puppet library. It’s been there for decades, and despite innumerable changes in the nearby retail storefronts, this hidden artistic community treasure remains.

Throughout the cellar, puppets of all shapes, sizes, and materials sit idle, ready to be borrowed by the public free of charge. Sara Peattie, a Boston-based puppeteer and puppet artist, runs the operation.

Peattie began her puppeteering career with Bread & Puppet, an iconic political puppet theater with roots in Vermont.

“It was very intense,” Peattie recalled. “A lot of people never really come back. … It’s formative. And it was a very intense time. It was the ’60s, you know, the Vietnam war. People were fighting. It was a whole thing.”

Peattie was involved with Bread & Puppet while it was actively making theater about that notorious quagmire. “I was in high school and I joined them and we did a tour of Europe,” she said. “It was all Vietnam-based.”

Puppet show on the road

Though she was involved with the theater, Peattie wasn’t the one actually designing characters for Bread & Puppet–“That’s Peter Schumann,” she explained. She added that while he “is a great artist, he’s also a pre-war unreconstructed German, especially as far as women are concerned.”

While their time at Bread & Puppet was important in their artistic journey, Peattie and fellow puppeteer George Konnoff eventually agreed that it was time to move on. “There wasn’t much scope in Bread & Puppet,” Peattie said. “So when George wanted to start something of his own too, we went off to San Francisco.”

During their time in the Bay Area, the duo created the Puppeteers’ Cooperative in 1976 as a way to connect puppeteers nationwide. The group focused on putting together “puppet parades, pageants, and ceremonies of celebration and complaint, using simple materials and movements to build community cardboard extravaganzas.” The alliance has since worked with many prestigious events across the country, from the Lincoln Center Out Of Doors Festival in New York to the First Night celebration in Boston.

After a few years in San Francisco, Peattie and Konnoff moved to Vermont. “They didn’t have enough interesting weather,” the former joked. Eventually, they found their way down to Boston in the late ’70s, and have been here ever since.

After years of filling shelves with puppets of their own creation, Peattie started sharing. “People kept lending puppets to other people, and then they wouldn’t know who had them,” she said. “We started writing them down, and that meant it was a library.”

‘You want them to see the dragon’

Like that, the Puppet Free Library was born. 

The borrowing process is simple: “They come in, they take a look, they sign them out with a little book,” Peattie said. “I tried computerizing it, but it was too complicated. Then they bring them back. If they don’t, I call them up and harass them. But who has the closet space really?”

Despite their scale, making one of Peattie’s giant puppets doesn’t take as long as one might imagine: “One of the big ones might take a week probably, because of the drying time of papier-mâché, because there’s a lot of sewing involved. The heads are papier-mâché, but actually most of the puppet is the body, which is fabric, you know, wire and bamboo.”

While her creations may look complicated, they’re relatively straightforward. Peattie actively works to achieve this effect. “It’s like dazzle camouflage,” she said. “At one point during I think World War I, they were camouflaging Navy ships by painting them in completely crazy colors. The idea being that you could see it, but you couldn’t figure out what to shoot at. And it worked, but it didn’t last long. Maybe they didn’t like people laughing at their ships.

“. . . It’s like that, you don’t want people to see how simple it is. Most of these are like a cardboard box on a stick with some fluff. You don’t want people to see that. You want them to see the dragon.”

On occasion, Peattie spots one of her own puppets out in public. “I’ve met them on the street,” she said. “Once George and I were in New York for Halloween and we brought puppets for the parade, but also some we lent out to somebody else. We were trekking back home, tired and sad, and the puppets went by in a ragtop car.”

Peattie said her favorite part about creating puppets is the constant variation: “There’s a lot of papier-mâché, there’s a lot of designing, there’s a lot of sewing, there’s a lot of working with big groups getting out on the street.”

And then there are the people behind the puppets. “It’s a really tight-knit community here,” she added. “It’s got a whole style, which is to have these festivals where everybody shows everybody else what they found out. … People like painters are born into cliquish schools and so on, and puppeteers really aren’t.”

You can stop by the Puppet Free Library on Tuesdays between 2 and 7pm to borrow a puppet from Peattie–no strings attached.

This article is syndicated by the MassWirenews service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at binj.news/signup/.